Change & Release Specialist

SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:

Change & Release Specialist required in Sandton. This role is responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing changes and software releases by ITIL4 best practices and ensures that changes are implemented with minimal service disruption and that releases are delivered efficiently and reliably into the production environment.

Main Responsibilities:

• End-to-End Change Management: Own the change process, including assessing, authorizing, and scheduling changes, while evaluating risks and ensuring alignment with business goals.
• Change Advisory Board (CAB) Facilitation: Lead CAB meetings, ensure timely decisions, and maintain thorough documentation and post-implementation reviews.
• Release Planning and Execution: Coordinate software and infrastructure releases, defining schedules and ensuring controlled, repeatable deployments with rollback plans.
• CI/CD Pipeline Management: Execute and maintain CI/CD pipelines for cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), using blue-green, canary, or rolling deployment strategies.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Implement automated infrastructure deployments using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, and support containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm).
• Pre-Production Environment Management: Maintain consistent pre-production environments mirroring production, managing lifecycle, configuration, and access controls.
• Monitoring and Incident Response: Integrate third-party monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and define alerting mechanisms for post-deployment validation and root cause analysis.
• Security and Compliance: Incorporate security scanning tools (e.g., Snyk, Trivy, SonarQube) into pipelines, enforce secure deployment practices, and ensure compliance with standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST.
• Stakeholder Collaboration and Communication: Act as a liaison between development, operations, QA, and stakeholders, aligning release/change activities with business priorities and conducting workshops/training.
• Documentation and Continuous Improvement: Maintain release documentation, track metrics, and contribute to retrospectives for ongoing process enhancement.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, Data Science, or a Business Administration, or a related field. Relevant certifications (e.g., PMP, ITIL) preferred.
• 5 years or more experience in release/change management, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure engineering.
• Experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native deployment practices.
• Proven hands-on experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines and deploying applications using blue-green or canary release strategies.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration.
• Strong understanding of pre-production/test environment architecture and best practices

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